Oh, I disagree that it is impossible to see how white privilege affected individual people by telling their stories. My own family is a case in point: My grandparents and parents were poor during the Great Depression. My generation are all very solidly middle to upper middle class, in one generation. Largely because we were unburdened by the color of our skins. Heck, our country is rife with the stories of powerful, almost exclusively white people who are born into poverty and yet succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams. It's The American Dream.
Bomb asked the inevitable question: how do you know?
One can speculate that, if your grandparents were black, then you, your siblings and cousins would not be middle/upper-middle class. But to imagine that alternate family history, one has to believe that blacks face socioeconomic barriers that whites do not. And if your audience already believes that, then you're just preaching to the choir.
Black people also face social pressures that white people do not--and are subject to those social pressures from a very, very young age. Black preschoolers are treated as less capable, more likely to need special education services, treated as more likely to have serious behavior problems, compared with their white counterparts regardless of socioeconomic station of either family.
Most of my schooling until I went to high school was at all white schools but in the first and second grade, there were a handful of black students. Even at 6 and 7, I could see that they were treated differently than I was. And at 7, there was an incident that led me to realize, years later, a small portion of the burden that a 7 year old black girl carried that I did not. I was allowed to be innocent of the potential consequences if we had been seen playing together. At age 7: they HAD to be aware of the potential consequences. Because however much a beating I would have taken at my home, it would have paled in comparison with what they would have faced--not necessarily at the hands of their parents who would have surely been aghast and terrified for their daughters.
The differences in perceptions of abilities, talents, personalities, predisposition for good/bad behavior, for violence, etc. start in the preschool years and are increasingly perceived to be true throughout childhood and into adulthood. Black children are perceived to be older, more sexually mature, more sexually promiscuous, less sensitive to pain or deprivation, less honest, less hard working, less capable of good and more inclined towards bad compared with white children. In the same classroom, where everyone is more or less of the same socioeconomic station.
How do I know? As a young child, my family was poor. I attended college on academic scholarships. As a young adult, I barely had enough money to pay rent and to eat--frankly not enough to eat every day and certainly not 3 meals. No matter where I went, into any department store or government building or whatever: I was always treated as though I belonged. My presence was never questioned. Only one time was I ever taken for a sales clerk, in an upscale department store where all of the salesclerks actually dressed far better than I ever could have.
My friends who were black? Were followed around stores, were questioned and harassed and treated as though they did not really belong, did not really deserve their place wherever it was.
If I put on my nice clothes and shoes, fix my hair, put on a little makeup and stroll.....anywhere: no one will think I don't belong. No one will think that I did not always have the money to afford the nice clothes on my back and shoes on my feet.
This is not the experience of black people. Even Oprah was told she could not afford a purse she wanted to look at in an upscale boutique in Europe. I've never had that experience although I assure you, I have been in the dressing rooms of lots of places I could not afford.
